(I wrote this a while ago. The fact that the body count is down in Iraq does not change the basic validity of what I wrote. I'm working on a larger piece now, and it's absorbing all my energy, but I'm getting tired of seeing the same last post, so I've decided to add this.)

            Sometimein the early 80's, a colleague asked my father when he was going toshave off his small goatee. My father instantly replied, 'When theVietnam War is over.'

            Bush and Cheney want to pretend that they ignored the Vietnam War. As Cheney said, he had other priorities. Apart from the outrageousness of his statement, when his generation as well as mine was bleeding out on the fields of Southeast Asia, his statement is an equally outrageous lie, at least in terms of his present attitudes and policies. We could say that his only priority is the Vietnam War.
            I do not have enough personal history to know if this country has ever had a period when the militarists and jingoists were not a potentially dominating minority. Perhaps we have always been an imperialist nation. The argument clearly could be made from the history.
            But I also know that there are nations that have been essentially pacific if not pacifist in their orientation, in whom the militarists are viewed with suspicion, or even disdain, as the potential murderers of the nation's children.
            The founders, who lived through a brutal civil as well as revolutionary war – as 'revisionist' historians are beginning to reveal – nearly to a man expressed their distrust of standing armies. They empowered the gun loving weirdos with their alternative, the armed local militia, the same human materiel from which they were finally able to fashion a professional domestic army capable of defeating the military of the greatest imperialist power of the times.
            You might think that our own warmongers would take the American Revolution itself as a cautionary tale. But, of course, they can only see America in the glory of its uniqueness. The fact that Vietnam and now Iraq are the present day Americans versus an America that has become the Britain of its age, is not something they are likely to notice.
            Except, as I have already said, Britain openly gloried in its imperialism and militarism, and, at its height, often made the difficult and sometimes arbitrary decisions necessary to pursue an open imperialist policy with success. But we are ambivalent. We are the great purveyor of democracy. Therefore we can't be imperialists. We smash through the government in Iraq. And then we immediately pretend to step back. 'You decide', we say. But every step of the way, American 'advisers' are twisting and manipulating the situation. Why can't we find a government of real leaders in Iraq? An idiot question. When we leave, the real leaders can emerge. But of course they will probably be far worse than the man we removed. And they will be far worse in part because of the situation we have created.
            It'stime for this country to make a decision about what it wants to be. If we want to be an imperialist power, let's just do it and be done with it : use our power to smash the world, put petty client despots in everywhere and take the oil. If it means war with Russia and China, well and good. Reinstate the draft without deferments. Begin the Spartan drill - a nation of soldiers and petty thieves.
            If not, if we really believe in democracy, then we should believe that democracy will prevail without our intervention. Militarism produces militarism. Violence produces violence. Being prepared to defend one's self is quite different from bombing civilians in another country.
            Can we really believe that a religious fanaticism as willing to destroy the innocent among its own people as among its ostensible enemies can long survive or even prevail within the common population in the present world? Democracy is its own agency.

            But in any case, in the meantime, I'm growing a small beard again. And maybe this time, like my father, I won't shave it off until the Vietnam War is over.